The baby and I went to the De Young Museum yesterday. A spur-of-the-moment late-afternoon trip that worked out pretty well. We did not venture into the King Tut exhibit, the museum's big attraction these days; it just seemed too expensive ($32.50) for a quick stroll with a baby.
I hadn't been to the De Young since they remodeled the place, except for two poetry readings in the auditorium. I have to say that I don't particularly like most museums--the sterility, the sense that the art is being held captive in all that white space...the sense that nothing is breathing, nothing is vital. This act, too, of walking into various galleries and absorbing ten paintings or sculptures or artifacts all at once, then moving on to the next room, just feels like a strangely empty activity to me. I never remember ninety-five percent of what I've seen. If I have to go to a museum, I prefer seeing an exhibition of one painter, or one small group of like-minded artists; that makes more sense to me than seeing a mish-mash of things in one fell swoop. Or I like small museums where there's a particular theme, or a particular sensibility at work. I loved the Picasso Museum in Paris, and the Peggy Guggenheim museum in, where was it, Venice? The De Young is like any big museum, one moves from Amish quilts to the tribes of Oceania to American modernist painting in the blink of an eye.
Having griped about museums--the baby and I both enjoyed the Africa and Oceania exhibits at the De Young; I would return to the museum just to see those two rooms. I also enjoyed Irving Petlin's large painting, "The Burning of Los Angeles" (I think that was the title), an impressionistic piece with barely discernible human figures amidst a tumult of yellow and brown blotches of paint; and a work by an artist whose last name was Cleary, I believe, a three-dimensional piece entitled "Mother, Springhouse" from his "Oakland Plantation Series." It shows a black woman in the attire of a nineteenth-century slave, cradling a white baby in her arms; the face of the baby has opened, like a door on hinges, to reveal the face of a black baby, perhaps the woman's own. They're standing on top of a large building with plantation-style columns in front. Standing a little bit lower than the mother, on either side of her, are two white girls with sinister smiles on their faces, holding switches in their hands. It's a striking piece, more beautifully wrought than I can describe here.
Those two artworks have that sense of urgency about them that I was describing in an earlier post. I believe that art has to impose itself on your psyche in some way, or it's just a matter of fooling around and being entertained, for both the artist and the viewer/listener. I believe that most postmodernist art is just about entertainment, in that sense. Of course, one person's urgency is another person's entertainment.
For instance: at the Pompidou museum in Paris last October, one exhibit featured a video of a woman spinning a hula-hoop around her waist; the hula-hoop was made out of barbed wire. The camera kept zooming in on her torso, to show that the hula-hoop was actually leaving scars on her skin. Certainly, a piece that has shock value, and that lingers in the memory. But this is not what I mean by "imposing itself on your psyche."
Perhaps I can describe it as art that leaves question marks in the air, versus art that attempts to decide everything for us. The image of the woman with barbed-wire hula hoops leaves nothing undecided. Mid-twentieth century American culture was bad, it was violent, it left scars on women's psyches. So we can reflect on that for an instant and move on to the next thing. But this image of a black female slave holding a white baby whose face opens up to reveal a black baby underneath? It troubles the psyche because one realizes, staring at this image, that much about the legacy of slavery remains unresolved in our culture, in ourselves. it raises a multitude of questions. It's an image of tenderness--the woman is cradling the white baby, after all--and of violence.
Art that can trouble us in this way is worth seeing--even if there's only one piece in the whole museum.
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